Leicester City seemed awash with gossip last week. Rumour had it that Sven-Goran Eriksson would shortly be announcing a key addition to his coaching staff. The man in question was the Swede's old friend and former England sidekick, Steve McClaren.

As it transpired Eriksson's dismissal on Monday afternoon ensured this potentially fascinating reunion of two former England managers was not to be but at least Sven and Steve now have time to meet up for dinner and discuss where it all went wrong.

If Eriksson needs telling that the Championship can be a cruel division no one is better placed to do so than McClaren. His brief reign at Nottingham Forest recently ended in a resignation prompted by an amalgam of appalling results and the nonappearance of promised summer signings.

The man whose failure with England is more than counterbalanced by winning the Dutch title with Twente and, earlier at Middlesbrough, lifting the League Cup and reaching the Uefa Cup final, arguably failed to appreciate the culture shock of life at Forest until it was too late.

A group of players used to the sergeant-major style approach of his predecessor, Billy Davies, reputedly struggled to adapt to McClaren's more considered managerial modus operandi. Meanwhile they did not take to his right-hand man, the sports psychologist Bill Beswick. Tellingly, Beswick tends to prompt love-hate reactions among players, with the Twente squad adoring him and certain former Manchester United players including, most notably Roy Keane, subscribing to his fan club.

To "get" Beswick, players must buy into some initially alien, often uncomfortable, ideas, including being "honest" with themselves and team-mates about their true feelings on certain thorny subjects.

If McClaren and Beswick failed to re-adjust sufficient Forest mindsets to their frequency, Eriksson could not quite make his 15 recent signings at Leicester – accrued at a cost approaching £15m – gel as swiftly as hoped.

Following last Saturday's humiliating 3-0 home defeat to Millwall, which left the pre-season promotion favourites 13th, although only eight points behind the leaders, Southampton, Eriksson was so dismayed at the lack of bonding that he introduced a Beswick-type team exercise.

Dividing his players into three groups he asked them to discuss and write down whey they thought things were going so badly wrong. The answers may have been interesting but they were also academic. By then Leicester's board had begun the process of disentangling themselves from Eriksson and perhaps started wondering whether Martin O'Neill could be enticed back to his old club.

The paradox is that while McClaren was unable to sign the new players whose introduction might have changed the City Ground culture and brought the rest of the squad around to his way of tactical and managerial thinking, Eriksson surely recruited far too many, thereby damaging the dressing room's naturally delicate and emotional ecosystem.

Buying promotion is easier said than done, especially when there remains a real ring of truth about the old adage that managers should think very carefully about signing more than four new players in any given transfer window. Easily shattered but hard to build, squad spirit is a fragile thing.

Never shy about spending money, Eriksson elevated Leicester's wage bill to the highest in the Championship but he made the mistake of not concentrating on acquiring hungry individuals on their way up. Instead, among others, in came Paul Konchesky, taking a clear step down from Liverpool, and Jermaine Beckford, doing likewise from Everton.

While the money was possibly more important than the challenge to some of Leicester's reshaped squad, Eriksson must surely have learnt to be wary of wealthy Thai owners by now. Having been ruthlessly sacked by the former Manchester City owner Thaksin Shinawatra, he has now been similarly dispatched by Leicester's chairman, Vichai Raksriaksorn.

While Eriksson clearly made mistakes he had been in the job for less than 13 months, during which he saved the club from relegation after replacing Paulo Sousa at the start of October last year, with the team bottom of the table. To place this season's struggles in context, Leicester are four points off fourth place and had lost only once in nine games before last Saturday.

The 63-year-old's overall stats at the King Power Stadium are not too shabby; of the 50 games Leicester played under Eriksson, 22 were won, 13 drawn and 15 lost.

He is said to be keen to get back into management at the earliest opportunity but, since leaving the England job, Eriksson's ultimately disappointing tenures at Manchester City, Notts County and now Leicester, along with underwhelming stints in charge of Mexico and Ivory Coast, must have severely diminished his pulling power with club chairmen.

McClaren's case is a bit more complex. At 50 he is still young enough to bounce back and the misses with England, Wolfsburg and Forest have to be set against major hits at Middlesbrough and Twente. The suspicion is that, had Randy Lerner not lost his nerve and bowed to online fan outrage last summer, McClaren might have made a very good Aston Villa manager. His purist passing game could well have been more to the Holte End's taste than Lerner imagined when he cancelled his scheduled interview for the post.

Not that either McClaren or Eriksson want to inhabit a world of if onlys. They will both be seeking employment and, in the short term, who would bet against them popping up on a short-term joint contract to coach one of the finalists for the Africa Cup of Nations in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea in January before going their separate ways once again?

The Championship may have poured scorn on their notions of privately battling it out for promotion but the Sven and Steve show is surely far from over … "Two Good Men in Africa" has the ring of a compelling impending instalment.